Redistributing food, If Nothing Else

THE PRICE OF FOOD IN AMERICA is so low that hardly anyone can make a living farming, so the government is forced to subsidize agriculture, and has for decades. American farmers, family and corporate, grow so much food that the country has twice as much as it needs, can't seem to figure out what to do with the surplus, and ends up throwing most of it away. Food producers are often paid to not grow crops. Meanwhile, most Americans are overweight, and yet, almost one out of every four American children do not always get enough to eat. As clever people like to say: "what's wrong with this picture?." For one thing, the entire economic system is out of balance, badly. One percent of the population has twenty, thirty, or forty percent of the wealth, whichever statistic you choose to believe, they all point in the same direction. The invisible hand of the free market seems to have rather strange ideas about who deserves what. Entertainers and athletes, according to free market theory, have earned the right to abundant surpluses of food by virtue of their enormous contributions to the market, consisting in an ability to entertain consumers. The core values of the American free market place entertainment above education, food, clothing, and shelter, in order of importance. We have a obese nation on the one invisible hand, and we have widespread poverty and hunger on the other invisible free market hand of fate. We might not be able to talk the body politic into redistributing wealth, of creating greater equality economically or politically, but if we are quite lucky, we might be able to provide enough proof of the children of hard working Americans going hungry to inspire a little more redistribution of food. Maybe, but don't count on it.